[Galaxy S I9000 General] tameracingdriver:
Well it looks like I am going to join the legion of folks who have given up with the Galaxy S.

I came from an iPhone 3G via an HTC Desire. I decided to move to the Android phones for a change, but in the end, the Galaxy S has really worn me down now.

To be fair, its not entirely the Galaxy S, but most of it is.

I was seduced by the talk of the best screen in the business (which it is, at least in the Android world), and talk of the prodigious power... well you can have all the power in the world, but any device is only as good as its weakest link, and in this case, it seems to be samsungs implementation of android. I have never come across a piece of hardware that is so powerful on paper, yet manages to disappoint with slow, laggy performance as much as it does.

So, as things stand today, here are my issues:-

1. Lag, even with the latest Voodoo Beta 4 fix, it still lags at times. Not too bad mind, but it's ridiculous that this had to be done to get a phone to run even half way decent on such powerful hardware. At this time, I would like to thank all of those folks on xda and on other forums who have spent their time and effort writing fixes for this problem. Without you guys, I probably would have sold it long ago.

2. GPS - simply doesn't work. 4 months on, still not fixed. Ironically, they run a TV ad in my country which mentions GPS and shows google navigation. IMO, they should be reported to trading standards, as it is not fit for purpose. I have tried on two occasions to use the GPS, and both times it left me high and dry. Fair enough, it works as long as i sit still, but this is unacceptable.

3. Battery life - very poor. Needs 2 charges a day, and thats even without running loads of widgets. Sometimes it will last a day, other times, for no apparent reason, it will drain the battery overnight (see below).

4. Android implementation - their implementation of android is well and truly butchered, it has an unprofessional, beta feel to it. Why when I wake my phone up, do I see for a split second my home screen before the lock screen appears? And as said, why does it lag? Why are there no OTA updates? How is it that other manufacturers can get updates out quickly and efficiently, but samsung cant? I have no faith that when 2.2 finally does arrive, it will even fix some of the problems.

5. The music player - why do I get random dropouts when playing music? Why isn't my cover art displayed with full detail? Why is the volume not loud enough? Why do I have to apply a patch to fix that? Why is the sound quality so much poorer than an iphone?

6. The camera - why does it over-compress images, resulting in lost detail. Why did it not have a flash as standard? Why do I have to use a paid for app to get the full quality of the camera (Vignette)? Why is the quality poorer than I was led to believe? I don't find the quality much better than my old iPhone 3G despite having more megapixels? Don't believe me? Try taking a photo with trees in it, and look at the artifacting and lack of detail.

7. Why no track ball or replacement - makes editing extremely akward and difficult despite their inclusion of a navigation keyboard (which doesn't always activate when I want it to)

8. Gallery - why is it so slow? Why can it not display photos with the full amount of detail when zooming in?

9. Why does it turn itself off randomly in my pocket, resulting in me having to take the battery out to get it to start again? I've missed important calls because of this.

10. Why the hell is the power / sleep button in such a stupid place? Why is the lock screen so easily unlocked by the phone simply rubbing around in my pocket? Thats happened at least twice, and one of those occasions, the dialer app was active, so it could quite easily have rung someone in my pocket... I've never had that problem since those godawful nokias many many years ago.

11. Quality of apps - pretty poor - I admit thats not the phones fault. For example, the xda app, which force closes every time I post. Or google goggles, which force closes 50% of the time I tried to use it. Or beautiful widgets, which randomly stopped updating for no apparent reason, and even reinstalling and getting rid of the cache folder would not make it work again. But then, how much of this caused by the phone itself?

12. Why when I do an update, am I forced to reinstall all my apps and settings again? Time consuming and annoying.

Why weren't these issues flagged up in all these reviews all over the internet on tech sites?

I've spent countless hours flashing firmwares, reinstalling apps, installing lag fixes of various descriptions, and still, the performance just isn't there for me.

Despite being slower on paper, the iphone 4 just kicks sand in its face performance wise.

I set the phone up the way I wanted it, with various widgets and things like that, and I ended up with a slow, relatively unstable phone with terrible battery life.

So to improve it, I went for a minimalist solution of as few homescreens and widgets as I could, so basically, my home screen has just become a slightly more flexible iphone rip off... and yes the performance improved, but what is the point in having all this flexibility and power if you don't use them to preserve battery life and boost performance?

I have had problems with this handset on an almost daily basis.

At first, I was going to wait for the Froyo update, but you know what, I've just completely lost confidence in samsung. I just don't think they care, or they aren't capable of sorting it out. Almost 4 months down the line, and my phones GPS STILL does NOT work! Unacceptable.

The final straw for me was last night. I used the phone, which was on 100% battery last night for a total of 10 minutes. When I woke the phone this morning, the battery is down to 22% despite having nothing other than google syncing and no widgets or other feeds to speak of. I think this is because my wifi went down - it was connected to wifi but no connectivity. I just dont get why this caused the phone to lose all of its power overnight.

I just feel like I waste too much time and energy trying to get this thing to work properly, and its worn me right down now. I am going to take a big financial hit, and sell it and go for the iphone 4, which is what I should have done in the first place.

Every day I'm at work I look at his phone with some envy at how fast it is, how stable, how good the battery life is, how he is able just to enjoy the apps his device offers, so I'm going back to the iphone. You can say what you like about how closed it is as a platform, or the type of people who run apple and own the iphone, but most level headed people would admit that the iphone does what 99% of the population would ever need out of a phone, and does it extremely well.

So I guess it's going to be goodbye from me. I am REALLY disappointed. To rub salt into the wounds, this is now the second time in the space of a year I've found out just how bad the resale value of Samsung products are, after I took a big hit selling a Blu-Ray player by them that seemed incapable of playing a DVD all the way to the end without crashing, or having weird random sound dropouts when playing Blu-Rays. Now I know why Samsung products have poor re-sale value: Because they are poor products. So, if anyone from Samsung is reading this, I doubt very much that you will care, being a faceless corporate company, but I will NEVER buy another of your products ever again for as long as I live, and I will recommend to every single one of my friends and family, and anyone else who will listen not to buy a Samsung product again.

No doubt some of you will call me a troll, well that's fair enough, but really, I am just an average Joe who is fed up with spending hours of his life fixing a product that frankly, wasn't even fit for release. How on earth this phone got 4 and 5 star reviews all over the internet (the main reason I bought it, TBH) is beyond me - I can only assume they got a completely different phone to me.

I guess I'll still check back here, because despite everything, I am still kind of interested to see how things progress, but my gut feeling is that when / if they ever get all of the issues sorted (which I really doubt at the moment TBH), most people will be well on their way to looking for its replacement anyway. This whole thing has left a very bitter taste in my mouth :(